H. Adler: The Wall

Like any consciousness, Arthur’s is a dense entanglement of past and present, fantasy and reality, daydream and meditation, hope and regret, tenderness and suffering, love and guilt — all of it occurring and recurring through the connected disorder of an extended chain of thought. However, because of the intensity and extremity of his experience, Arthur’s consciousness threatens to bind him forever to the past, and the narrative strategy of The Wall is meant to mimic this conflict. By employing a kind of mise-en-scène technique — whereby Arthur finds himself thinking about life in Prague right after the war only to then find himself at a gathering of postwar intellectuals in London, or back in the Bohemian forest where he once walked with Franziska — the novel shuttles the reader between the past and the present without any clear sign that such a switch has occurred. In fact, the past is always present for us as readers, as it is for Arthur, for it lurks in the shadows, waiting to appear at any moment, whether as reverie or as nightmare.

The novel’s nonlinear plot does at times make it difficult for us to know just what is going on or how we ended up in a certain locale or set of circumstances. However, such challenges are performative in nature and are meant to show how the duress of Arthur’s past constantly informs the present, in much the same way that flashbacks occur to those suffering post-traumatic stress, or even how everyday memory constantly transports us between realms, surprising us with what pops up suddenly in the course of our thoughts. Whether it be the voice that threatens to expel Arthur as Adam, his haunting memories of Franziska, his nightmares of being carted away by the pallbearers, or the guilty visions he has of his dead parents, all of these function as eruptive dislocations that not only control Arthur’s consciousness but define it. Therefore, the difficulty of the novel is really meant to engage the reader in the difficulty of being Arthur Landau, and to appreciate that is to appreciate the weight that extreme duress places on the imagination, as well as the imagination’s inventive capacity to order and comprehend the past in the most fantastical of ways through memory.

Indeed, the “wall” that Arthur finds himself standing before and unable to penetrate is the past. Because of this, Arthur realizes, “I don’t belong to human society. I and the wall, we are alone, we belong together; there is nothing else that I belong to.” Arthur, however, is not willing to settle for this, and thus he continually strives to make some connection to the world and to find a place within it. Unfortunately, despite initial avid interest in his past on the part of his old friends and the new people he meets, little practical help comes his way. Instead, like the heaps of prayer books and dusty portraits of the departed that he helped collect and sort at the museum “back there” (as Adler himself did at the Jewish Museum in Prague right after the war), in London’s “metropolis” Arthur is treated as a kind of exotic relic, interesting at first for the descriptions of the horrors he can provide, but ultimately dispensable as a fellow competitor for the limited opportunities available amid postwar privation.

All of this would make for a very dour novel, were it not for the fact that, in the end, The Wall is — surprisingly and paradoxically — a love story. Arthur’s life with Johanna and their two children is crucial to his survival, and their home together on West Park Row remains the anchor of his life throughout the novel. There is an immediate attraction between him and Johanna when they meet at a social gathering, and their relationship is what allows Arthur to come to grips with himself and with the past. Johanna, in fact, sees the wall that he confronts quite differently from the way he sees it. “I honestly believe that the wall is your protection,” she tells him. “It separates you from your past, from all the horror.” Although Arthur does not entirely agree, he nonetheless adores his wife and confesses, “When I look at Johanna I am often happy, though sometimes also sad, yet always something is affirmed, and many fears are tamped down. What happens between us folds in upon itself and creates an understanding; we trust each other, there’s no need to search for anything else.”

Yet search he does — for his parents, for release from Franziska, for support for his writing, for meaningful intellectual engagement, and for a place in the world. Though Johanna provides emotional grounding while in some ways living his life for him, writing is the other means by which Arthur finds some kind of solace. Just as the novel continually returns to West Park Row and his family, it is in his study that Arthur is most at home while working on his Sociology of Oppressed People . The source of this work is his own experience of survival during the war, just as Adler tapped his own past in order to write his study of Theresienstadt. But, as was true for Adler, Arthur does not simply write a memoir of his experience; he studies it in a scholarly manner, in order to do full justice to it and to the many who perished. He does this in part because of the difficulty of holding on to his experience through memory: “I collected so much experience and carried it along with me, so much pressing deep into my memories, held there as I told myself I would need it, and now it appeared to me it was indeed lost, myself unable to find it any longer, Franziska’s death and my survival having shredded the volume that gave the contents some kind of sense, all my stowed-away knowledge now covered in dust and ground down to a pulp.”

Although Arthur admits, at first, that “all I wanted to set down was one word, and yet it all remained bottled up inside me,” he does not give up. Realizing that “the less of a person I am because I am not allowed to exist, the more the world is closed to me,” he nonetheless sits down to write a story titled “The Letter Writers,” which appears about halfway through The Wall . This simple act somehow frees him, allowing him

to give in but not to give up.… To slam into the wall as if it were not there, to flatter and play about with it, as if it would let itself be conquered, yet to acknowledge it and not doubt such knowledge of it, accepting that it’s pointless to do so and will probably always be pointless. To exit the most secret depths with great vigor, as if victory were assured, and let myself be battered and defeated, pushed back, back into the hidden recesses! To hope for nothing and then to invoke the wondrous as if what I had never dared hope were already guaranteed.

Writing is what allows Arthur to exist, “to make a plea out of a continually obsessed conscience, a plea directed at someone beyond all borders,” be they the borders of geography, history, memory, or even time. This plea is particularly urgent because it is not one made by Arthur alone. Through his experience at the museum while collecting portraits and artifacts left behind by “the disappeared,” he comes to understand powerfully the burden of his responsibility as a survivor, as he tells his fellow curators:

We are remnant survivors, who are there for all who are not. That’s true in general; the living are there for the dead, for their predecessors, and thus we also represent the history of the dead. How difficult it is, then, to exist as oneself when we are also history, so much history! But we are particularly there for all those dragged away by force and annihilated.… We are the history of the exterminated, the history of the shadow that consumed them. And we collect what was stolen from them, what we can store up of their remains. But that is indeed alive and really not history. It amounts to neither memory nor keepsakes; it is commemoration.